Plans for a controversial water bottling plant at Brooks City Base on the South Side have been abandoned after it became clear that City Council had serious concerns about the project and was uncomfortable moving forward with it.

Express Newsletters

Get the latest news, sports and food features sent directly to your inbox.

On Friday, Brooks Development Authority terminated a letter of intent with a company that was looking to open the bottling facility, said BDA President and CEO Leo Gomez. Although Gomez has never publicly confirmed the name of the company, sources have said it is California-based Niagara Bottling.

“What it means is until we figure out how we really want to move forward on the rezoning for that parcel and its related parcels, until we determine that, we’re not going to ask council to reset a date for it (the case),” Gomez said.

The news about the project’s demise was first reported by the Rivard Report.

Brooks officials had been pushing the project forward, paying to expedite the zoning application in the hopes of luring the company to San Antonio. A source told the San Antonio Express-News that Niagara has also been eyeing Schertz and Seguin as possible locations.

But news about plans for a bottling plant — in a city that relies heavily on an aquifer that is vulnerable in a drought — and the speed at which the project was moving forward raised concerns among water conservationists and some council members about the idea of bottling and selling local water.

Ultimately, Gomez said, Brooks got the message from council members that they did not want to see the project advance.

“After their discussion, that was their direction,” Gomez said. “We’re partners with the city. If that’s their direction, then we respect it.” He said he got a call last week from District 3 Councilwoman Rebecca Viagran, who represents the area that includes Brooks, and Assistant City Manager Carlos Contreras, who also serves on the Brooks board, that council did not want to see the project move forward.

Gomez was not part of the council discussion but said “it was clearly a water issue and the timing and the optics of it all.” The fact is, Gomez said, the plant would have used less than 1 percent of the San Antonio Water System’s annual capacity and would have brought 75 to 100 jobs to the area.

Council members discussed the issue in executive session last week.

District 1 Councilman Roberto Treviño, who was in the session, said he couldn’t talk about the specifics of that conversation but generally said council “felt it was just maybe not the right time for such a project.

“I think it’s a tough issue because we certainly want economic development for certain sectors of our city, especially Brooks City Base,” Treviño said. “But we also have to protect our natural resources.” He said the amount of water it was estimated the company would use, more than 800 million gallons a year, “was really what shocked us all.”

SAWS CEO Robert Puente said if the water bottling plant had been built, it would have been one of the city’s five biggest water consumers. But Puente added the project would not have threatened the city’s water supply.

“The issue, however, is the perception of our customers, our ratepayers that we are buying very expensive water and then allowing another company to come in and resell it at their profit,” Puente said.

SAWS plans to add more water sources to its supply in the coming years by building a desalination plant and partnering with a private company to develop a 142-mile pipeline that runs across Central Texas, transporting up to 16.3 billion gallons annually from the Carrizo Aquifer in Burleson County to San Antonio, a project called Vista Ridge.

District 4 Councilman Rey Saldaña said moving forward with a bottling plant would have sent a signal to the many people who raised concerns about water conservation during the Vista Ridge pipeline debate last year that the city wasn’t taking their concerns seriously. The jobs also would not have been high-paying ones.

“This was a tough one,” Saldaña said. “It’s clear we try everything we can to bring jobs to the city. But it’s also clear that the bigger picture, in this case, securing and not throwing off-kilter the Vista Ridge pipeline, was more important than 100 jobs paying below the minimum wage.”

“The vision — to have a secure water source — I think this would have really hit at our credibility,” Saldana said.

The case was then to be fast-tracked to City Council two days later. Council members were technically only supposed to consider whether the zoning change was appropriate for the site, and growing concerns about the project led to it being shelved until after council’s July recess.

Those concerns apparently were too numerous to save the project.

Gomez has continued to emphasize that, ultimately, this was a zoning case. Brooks still plans to rezone that entire part of its South Side campus to light industrial when the time is appropriate.